Christianity and Philosophy: William of Ockham (1)

could God have made this world so that the highest good is to murder unto steal and to hate could God have made a world in which the greatest commandment is to hate the Lord your God and to hate your neighbor and to only care about yourself most of us I think respond intuitively that by saying of course not those of us of course who believe in the God that we find in the Bible the God who calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves and to love the Lord our God with all our heart soul mind and strength it seems entirely counterintuitive to think that God could have made a world in which the highest good and the highest value is hate or murder we have a William of Occam was a 14th century 13 to 14th century philosopher and theologian who explored this idea and he argued that God's will is not restricted or bound by anything not even some kind of divine nature that somehow restricts or limits God's will so God's will is Almighty it's supreme with no limitation at all if there's no limitation at all then it is at least conceivable that God could have made a world in which contradictions could come about God could make a world in which hate is the supreme value rather than love and this was the logical implication or inference from Ockham's volunteerism it's called coming from the Latin word for will volune das meaning will and so God's will for Occam is supreme most Christian theologians and philosophers have considered the will of God as really being harmonious with and one with the divine nature so that what God is also tells us what God will do so that when we discover the highest good is love for instance for us as human beings we are able to get some insight into the divine nature that God is love and because God is love by nature then God's command must be that rational creatures like ourselves are called to love as well in in whatever way we as creatures are capable of doing that and so the the Christian sort of traditional understanding of God prohibits thinking of a possible world in which murder and hate and theft and lying and so on are the supreme goods akhom however as is famously known ahkam chose to take the path of holding that the will of God is supreme above everything else and if you add to Occam's voluntourism a second characteristic of his thinking that was enormous ly important and I'll throw out very quickly and that is what's called nominalism nominalism getting its an its name from the word that means name is a particular position with respect to the ancient philosophical conundrum called universals the problem of universals in an earlier presentation we talked some about plato's concept of universals and we could talk about Aristotle's and and the way that subsequent thinkers dealt with the issue of universals universal categories and we could look at all sorts of different ones take for instance the category of triangle as a mathematical universal concept if I ask you about a triangle and I ask you to think about geometrical triangle and I ask you how big is a geometrical triangle your response is probably going to be well it could be any any number of sizes in fact there's an infinite number of possible sizes that a triangle could be and what Aristotle or Plato would point out here as well as many other thinkers they would point out that this idea of an infinite range of possibilities for a triangle means that a triangle is not a particular object at least not geometrically speaking the notion of triangle or the universal category of triangle is one that encompasses or embraces countless particular ones and so you can't restrict triangularity or geometrical triangle to one triangle it embraces many different trying and so what akhom argued or what Arkham reasoned is that this idea of triangle as a universal category is really just an illusion triangle as a as a category is just a name that we give to a bunch of objects that resemble each other but the the notion of triangularity is not in itself a reality it's only a name it's an empty empty sort of devoid breath of air that you blow out of your mouth that has no real object there is no universal triangle now there is no universal human or man that with there's only particular things only individual things so what this means there are all kinds of interesting implications of this if there are no Universal categories then there is no such thing as human nature if there's no such thing as human nature or any other nature for that matter there is no common shared essence or nature about which we can speak objectively there are only many particular things this has certain consequences for morality for instance and many other areas as well but I'll just mention morality it has huge implications for morality because if we can't talk about human nature or what's good for us as human beings all we can talk about is what we're told to do so out of this historically out of nominalism will arise all types of duty ethics like we find in Immanuel Kant and others Duty ethics are simply based on a command of saying that this is what you must do in contrast to prior forms of ethics like we find in Aristotle in the various forms of virtue ethics or in Plato and certainly Agustin and Aquinas and all of these others ethics is a discovery of the internal trajectory or tendencies or inclinations of human nature whereas in nominalism there is no human nature to talk about and so if there is any morality it is a command that comes to us not something that we discover from from an analysis of an experience of human nature so these are very very different concepts that are being by William of Occam in the 13th and 14th centuries very much a radical break with what preceded him especially in terms of the volunteerism where the Divine Will is exalted above the divine nature and then secondly the issue of nominalism where universals are taken to have no real status in in reality but instead that it's simply an empty expression or an empty word that is a convenient shorthand for referring to a bunch of different objects that share something in common or seem to be similar in some way when in fact there is no like I say no real objectivity to that Universal concept or category that one uses lots of practical implications of this move in in philosophy and also theological implications of that but that's a short introduction to William of Occam perhaps before concluding I could throw out one other short item from William of Occam he's very famous for the concept or idea that's been associated with him called Occam's razor awesome Occam's razor is the principle that the simplest explanation is to be preferred over the more cumbersome complex explanations this principle is actually not new to way i'ma Baucom you can find it in Saint Thomas and other places in the in the Middle Ages and before but through whatever historical process preceded that akhom has become famously associated with that principle that the simpler explanation is to be preferred to the more complicated explanation

Channel: Mark McNeil

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Keywords: william, of, ockham, catholic, Mark, McNeil, Strake, Jesuit, God, Christ, will, power, apologetics, atheism, atheist, freethinker, Chris

Id: KlICBTcY-rc

Length: 8min 28sec (508 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 07 2014